M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable is widely regarded as one of his best – and most underrated – works, and Split was a massive hit that proved that the director is still talented after he suffered from a long series of misfires. So it goes without saying that Glass is one of the most anticipated projects he’s ever worked on – and filming on it begins today.

M. Night Shyamalan’s sequel Glass, follows the story of three people with real-world superpowers: David Dunn (who has super-strength and invulnerability, along with the ability to see psychometric visions), Kevin Wendell Crumb (who has multiple split personalities that allow his body to access superhuman abilities), and Elijah Price (a man gifted with incredible intelligence, but at the drawback of suffering from a weak skeletal system). Now, it seems as though Glass will finally begin filming today:

About to go to sleep before the first day of shooting #Glass. Thinking about the incredible week of rehearsals we had & hoping for the best.

Little is known about the plot of Glass, but Universal has provided a synopsis:

Following the conclusion of Split, Glass finds Dunn pursuing Crumb’s superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men.

UPDATE: It’s also been confirmed that the minor dispute over distribution has been settled, according to Deadline. While Split was a Universal movie, Unbreakable was made under one of Disney’s alternative labels. Since Glass is a crossover, the solution that the companies came up with is that Universal will distribute the film domestically and Disney will distribute the film abroad. Shyamalan also shared an image signifying that filming has begun in earnest:

Glass will be released on January 18, 2019. The film stars Bruce Willis as David Dunn, Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price (Mr. Glass), Charlayne Woodard as Mrs. Price, Spencer Treat Clark as Joseph Dunn, James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb (The Horde), and Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey Cooke. Sarah Paulson will be joining the film as a new character.

10 Reasons ‘Unbreakable’ Is A Great Superhero Movie

Unbreakable was before its time, a stealth superhero movie disguised as a mystery thriller. It was M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up to his breakthrough third film The Sixth Sense and remarkably, it hit theaters before comic book cinema became de rigueur for the Hollywood franchise factory, on November 22, 2000. While Batman and Superman lay dormant and before Spider-Man swung onto the scene, Shyamalan’s subversive take on comic books and superheroes was meta before meta, gritty and realistic before it was cool, and innovative to the point few knew what to make of it initially.

It was the one film of his that seemed prime for a sequel, and the question followed him for years. At one point, the sequel was to have been part of his now-defunct anthology film series dubbed The Night Chronicles that began (and ended) with the 2010 film Devil. It’s clear now he was talking about Split, but the idea was shelved after Shyamalan strayed into director jail after The Last Airbender and After Earth. More than that, Shyamalan made it a not only another secret origin story (this time of the villainous variety) but a stealth spinoff.

At the end of Split, there is a short credit scene set in a diner where the patrons watch news coverage of the film’s aftermath. The lead character Kevin (James McAvoy), whose condition of dissociative identity disorder causes the police to dub him “The Horde,” has escaped after literally going into Beast mode and killing/cannibalizing two of the three young female captives he’d kept locked up during the film. The incident sparks a memory in two customers: wasn’t there another crazy person, this one in a wheelchair, who the police named? Another customer says yeah, his name was Mr. Glass and the camera pans to reveal the speaker is Bruce Willis as David Dunn, the Unbreakable protagonist.

Turns out, as Shyamalan said way back in 2010, Kevin originated from the first drafts of the Unbreakable screenplay. Now that Split’s success is poised to give birth to the long-awaited sequel, with Shyamalan sitting down to write it soon with the intention of making it his next film, let’s look back on the legacy of the genre-bending original that still fascinates over 16 years later. Click Next to start!